mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs

An external fragmentation event was previously described as

    When the page allocator fragments memory, it records the event using
    the mm_page_alloc_extfrag event. If the fallback_order is smaller
    than a pageblock order (order-9 on 64-bit x86) then it's considered
    an event that will cause external fragmentation issues in the future.

The kernel reduces the probability of such events by increasing the
watermark sizes by calling set_recommended_min_free_kbytes early in the
lifetime of the system.  This works reasonably well in general but if
there are enough sparsely populated pageblocks then the problem can still
occur as enough memory is free overall and kswapd stays asleep.

This patch introduces a watermark_boost_factor sysctl that allows a zone
watermark to be temporarily boosted when an external fragmentation causing
events occurs.  The boosting will stall allocations that would decrease
free memory below the boosted low watermark and kswapd is woken if the
calling context allows to reclaim an amount of memory relative to the size
of the high watermark and the watermark_boost_factor until the boost is
cleared.  When kswapd finishes, it wakes kcompactd at the pageblock order
to clean some of the pageblocks that may have been affected by the
fragmentation event.  kswapd avoids any writeback, slab shrinkage and swap
from reclaim context during this operation to avoid excessive system
disruption in the name of fragmentation avoidance.  Care is taken so that
kswapd will do normal reclaim work if the system is really low on memory.

This was evaluated using the same workloads as "mm, page_alloc: Spread
allocations across zones before introducing fragmentation".

1-socket Skylake machine
config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale XFS (no special madvise)
4 fio threads, 1 THP allocating thread
--------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9:   804694
4.20-rc3+patch:                      408912 (49% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                    18421 (98% reduction)

                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Amean     fault-base-1      653.58 (   0.00%)      652.71 (   0.13%)
Amean     fault-huge-1        0.00 (   0.00%)      178.93 * -99.00%*

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-1        0.00 (   0.00%)        5.12 ( 100.00%)

Note that external fragmentation causing events are massively reduced by
this path whether in comparison to the previous kernel or the vanilla
kernel.  The fault latency for huge pages appears to be increased but that
is only because THP allocations were successful with the patch applied.

1-socket Skylake machine
global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage-xfs (MADV_HUGEPAGE)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9:  291392
4.20-rc3+patch:                     191187 (34% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                   13464 (95% reduction)

thpfioscale Fault Latencies
                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Min       fault-base-1      912.00 (   0.00%)      905.00 (   0.77%)
Min       fault-huge-1      127.00 (   0.00%)      135.00 (  -6.30%)
Amean     fault-base-1     1467.55 (   0.00%)     1481.67 (  -0.96%)
Amean     fault-huge-1     1127.11 (   0.00%)     1063.88 *   5.61%*

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-1       77.64 (   0.00%)       83.46 (   7.49%)

As before, massive reduction in external fragmentation events, some jitter
on latencies and an increase in THP allocation success rates.

2-socket Haswell machine
config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale XFS (no special madvise)
4 fio threads, 5 THP allocating threads
----------------------------------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9:  215698
4.20-rc3+patch:                     200210 (7% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                   14263 (93% reduction)

                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Amean     fault-base-5     1346.45 (   0.00%)     1306.87 (   2.94%)
Amean     fault-huge-5     3418.60 (   0.00%)     1348.94 (  60.54%)

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-5        0.78 (   0.00%)        7.91 ( 910.64%)

There is a 93% reduction in fragmentation causing events, there is a big
reduction in the huge page fault latency and allocation success rate is
higher.

2-socket Haswell machine
global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage-xfs (MADV_HUGEPAGE)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9: 166352
4.20-rc3+patch:                    147463 (11% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                  11095 (93% reduction)

thpfioscale Fault Latencies
                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Amean     fault-base-5     6217.43 (   0.00%)     7419.67 * -19.34%*
Amean     fault-huge-5     3163.33 (   0.00%)     3263.80 (  -3.18%)

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-5       95.14 (   0.00%)       87.98 (  -7.53%)

There is a large reduction in fragmentation events with some jitter around
the latencies and success rates.  As before, the high THP allocation
success rate does mean the system is under a lot of pressure.  However, as
the fragmentation events are reduced, it would be expected that the
long-term allocation success rate would be higher.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181123114528.28802-5-mgorman@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Zi Yan <zi.yan@cs.rutgers.edu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 21 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 7d73882e2c27..187ce4f599a2 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -63,6 +63,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
 - swappiness
 - user_reserve_kbytes
 - vfs_cache_pressure
+- watermark_boost_factor
 - watermark_scale_factor
 - zone_reclaim_mode
 
@@ -856,6 +857,26 @@ ten times more freeable objects than there are.
 
 =============================================================
 
+watermark_boost_factor:
+
+This factor controls the level of reclaim when memory is being fragmented.
+It defines the percentage of the high watermark of a zone that will be
+reclaimed if pages of different mobility are being mixed within pageblocks.
+The intent is that compaction has less work to do in the future and to
+increase the success rate of future high-order allocations such as SLUB
+allocations, THP and hugetlbfs pages.
+
+To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor parameter,
+the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of 15,000 means
+that up to 150% of the high watermark will be reclaimed in the event of
+a pageblock being mixed due to fragmentation. The level of reclaim is
+determined by the number of fragmentation events that occurred in the
+recent past. If this value is smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks
+worth of pages will be reclaimed (e.g.  2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor
+of 0 will disable the feature.
+
+=============================================================
+
 watermark_scale_factor:
 
 This factor controls the aggressiveness of kswapd. It defines the